Saturday, 28 February 2015

UNCLEAN SLATES

Many years before I wrote The Far Corner I was working in London as a grill chef. One of the washers-up was an elderly man with a dancehall gigolo moustache and the sour scent of alcoholism. He lived in a Salvation Army Hostel off the Whitechapel Road. He'd come originally from Tow Law. Raised during the Depression, he spoke bitterly of the means test men coming into the house with a piece of chalk and marking with Xs all the possessions that must be sold before any benefits would be paid, and movingly of bike rides through the high meadows of the North Pennines on warm summer nights, when the foundrymen and the miners helped farmers with harvest in return for a feed and a night in a barn. He claimed to have been an apprentice at Hartlepools United back when the formidable Bill Norman was boss.

He said, “One day at training, it's freezing cold and blowing a bloody blizzard. We were all grumbling about the cold,” he said, “And Bill got really pissed off with us. He says, “It’s not bloody cold. It’s not bloody cold at all.” And he suddenly stripped off all his clothes and rolled about in the snow stark bollock naked, yelling at us to toughen up. He must have been bloody crackers..”

The washer-up didn't get offered terms, but given what he'd seen maybe he thought it a lucky escape.

In the summer I had an interesting chat
with a retired professional footballer. He’d grown up in Ashington, and started
out at Port Vale when Stanley Matthews was the manager. After that the old pro had spent most of his career in North East non-League
football.

Over the years he’d played for many different managers, but one in
particular stuck in his mind. “I joined a Northern League club not far from
here," he said, “I’ll never forget the first game. The manager’s pre-match
team talk goes like this. He takes an egg and he holds it up in front of us. He says, “This here, this is the opposition”. He put the egg down on the floor of
the dressing room. Then he goes outside. He come back in a few seconds later with
this bloody great slab of slate. He says, “And this here, this is you”. And he lifted this bloody
slate up above his head and slams it down on top of the egg. “Now,” he shouts, “I
want you to go out there and splatter the fuckers”.

The retired player raised his eyebrows and shrugged his
shoulders. “I didn’t stop there long”, he said.

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(Thanks to Kevin Donnelly for the photo)

About the Blogger

Harry Pearson is the author of The Far Corner and nine other works of non-fiction, including Slipless in Settle - winner of the 2011 MCC/Cricket Society Prize. From 1997 through to 2012 he wrote over 700 columns for the Guardian sports section. He has worked for When Saturday Comes since 1988.

About This Blog

When The Far Corner came out a well known football writer whose work I like and respect told me he been unable to finish it. Too much non-League. Too many howls of outrage in the lumpy rain of steeltown winters. Not enough rapture. ‘I’m only interested in the great stars, the great occasions,’ he said, ‘To me football is like opera.’

I don’t care much for opera. And so I have carried on much as I did before: writing about unsung people in rough places where the PA plays 'Sex on the Beach' in the coal-scented February fog and men with ill-advised hair bellow, 'Christ on a bike, this is the drizzling shits.'I could justify this with grandiosity. I could say Dickens and Balzac, Orwell and Zola were more interested in the lower divisions of society than its elite. I could tell you that the sportswriters I most admire are almost all Americans whose primary subject is boxing. AJ Liebling, WC Heinz, Thomas Hauser, Phil Berger and the rest inhabit a world where hucksters, gangsters, the desperate, the doomed and the mad hang out in stinking gyms and amidst the rattle of slot machines, and trainers such as Roger Mayweather say things like, "You don't need no strategy to fight Arturo Gatti. Close your eyes, throw your hands and you'll hit him in the fucking face."

But that is to be wise after the event. Norman Mailer said every writer writes what he can. It is not a choice. We play the cards we're dealt.

A few years ago I stood in a social club kitchen near Ashington listening to an old bloke named Bill talk about a time in the early 1950s when, on a windswept field at East Hirst, beneath anthracite sky, he’d watched a skinny blond teenager ‘float over that mud like a little angel’, glowing at the memory of Bobby Charlton.

Opera is pantomime for histrionic show offs, but this? This is true romance.

The First 30 Years features some new writing and lots of older pieces going back to the late-1980s. This work first appeared in When Saturday Comes, The Guardian, various other newspapers, fanzines and a number of those glossy men's lifestyle magazines that have women in bras on the cover. It is my intention over the next year or so to collect it all here, if for no other reason than to prove to my family that I did do some work every once in a while.

In keeping with the original rhythms of the game I'll post a new piece every Saturday (kick-off times may vary)

The best images here have been provided by a trio of the great photographers I've been lucky enough to work with over the years. I'm very grateful to Tim Hetherington, Colin McPherson, and Peter Robinson for letting me use their work - all of which is copyright of those individuals and cannot be reproduced without their permission.